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Back to Work

After a few months away from blogging I'm back and ready for a fresh challenge. We've been in the house since Labor Day but we haven't tackled any real projects until now. We plan to make up for that time off in the next few months. Our big project will be building a garage, but there are countless small projects that go along with the garage. First up is our front entry situation. Here is what we've been looking at for the last eight months.

So far the only improvement I have made was planting these maple trees a few weeks ago.

In an effort to dress up the front of this bland little ranch and tie in with our future garage we decided to replace the concrete steps with a covered porch. Our first step was to get rid of the precast steps using craigslist. I was surprised at how many people were interested in our free steps and how few of them had any plan for how to move 800 lbs of concrete. But eventually we found the right person to haul them away. My brother built us a temporary set of steps to use until we build the porch.

We still did not have a clean slate to work with. Since our new porch will have steps on the side instead of the front we decided that we really did not need the front walk. At some point we will fill the hole and plant grass to combine two small yards into one larger yard. For now we have this:

The walk from the driveway was great for shedding water but miserable to shovel. Whoever poured the concrete did nothing to prepare the soil underneath which is why it buckled.

When we pour the driveway and garage slab we will also pour a sidewalk leading to the new porch.

I don't usually appear in the blog but Luke snapped a few pictures while I was working on the front walk.

Our last little preparatory task was to dig the holes for the porch footings. We were concerned this would be miserable work because our soil is so rocky but at 18" we hit good, alluvial dirt and it was easy digging for the rest of the holes.

Since the digging went faster than planned we had time to mix up some concrete and pour the footings for the porch posts. Now that the prep work is done we're ready to start building a porch. Stay tuned.

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